Whether you’ve inherited a batch of Microsoft PowerPoint slides from a business colleague or you have several of your own that would benefit from being merged into a single presentation, Microsoft PowerPoint helps you perform the merge in just a few clicks. Benefits of a single PowerPoint presentation include letting your audience progress through the slides linearly without stopping to load a new file, as well as letting you skip recreating files that may already be in existence, saving time. You also have the option to rearrange the slides, charting an entirely new course.

Open PowerPoint and navigate to the one presentation to serve as the base for the merged presentation, the slideshow you’ll be importing the others into. Double-click the PPT or PPTX file to open it.

Click the “File” tab, select “Save As,” type a new file name and click the “Save” button. While you haven’t yet made any changes, this prevents you from automatically overwriting the original.

Click the “File” tab again. Browse to the next presentation and open it. The presentation opens in a new window. Position the cursor on the first slide in the slide deck on the left side of the screen. Click once on the slide. Press and hold down the “Shift” key. Scroll to the very last slide and click it. All the slides in the deck are now highlighted. Release the “Shift” key. Right-click any highlighted slide and select “Copy.” You may close this PowerPoint window if desired.

Scroll through the slide deck on the original presentation. Click the place where the new presentation should be inserted, such as after the very last slide or in between two slides. Right-click and select the middle icon in the “Paste Options” section, “Keep Source Formatting.” The slides are now merged.

Repeat the process to open, copy and paste any other presentations to merge them to the new aggregate presentation.

Click the “File” button. Click “Save” to resave the new changes.

Tip

Once you’ve pasted in the presentations, you can move different slides around, even if you don’t move the entire group as one. To move a single slide, click it in the slide deck and drag it to the new place. To move multiple slides, click once on each while holding down the “Ctrl” key, then drag them into place.

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About the Author

Fionia LeChat is a technical writer whose major skill sets include the MS Office Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher), Photoshop, Paint, desktop publishing, design and graphics. LeChat has a Master of Science in technical writing, a Master of Arts in public relations and communications and a Bachelor of Arts in writing/English.